Charles Tilly: 1929 - 2008

Social scientist and author

Taught sociology and political science at Columbia University

May 04, 2008|By Douglas Martin, New York Times News Service

NEW YORK — Charles Tilly, a social scientist who combined historical interpretation and quantitative analysis in a voluminous outpouring of work to forge often novel intellectual interpretations -- as when he compared nation states to protection rackets -- died Tuesday in the Bronx. He was 78.

The cause was lymphoma, said John Tucker, a spokesman for Columbia University, where Mr. Tilly was the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science.

Mr. Tilly mined immense piles of original documents for raw data and contemporary accounts -- including municipal archives, unpublished letters and diaries -- that he used to develop theories applicable to many contexts. A particular interest was the development of the nation state in Europe, which he suggested was partly a military innovation. In his 1990 book "Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990-1990," he argued that the increasingly large costs of gunpowder and large armies required big, powerful nation states with the power to tax.

In 1985, he gave early indications of his argument that war made states in an article that said nation states, with their monopolies on violence, function like gangsters' protection rackets. He said that governments emphasize, create and stimulate external threats, then ask their citizens to pay for defense.

"Consider the definition of a racketeer as someone who creates a threat and then charges for its reduction," he wrote in a chapter of "Bringing the State Back In."

Provocative and profound ideas repeatedly appeared in Mr. Tilly's 51 books and monographs and more than 600 scholarly articles.

Marshaling insights from sociology and political science, both of which he taught, he took on subjects including urban migration, the French Revolution, the dynamics of political contention and the sociology of trusting others.

Mr. Tilly was born in Lombard, Ill., and in 1950 graduated from Harvard, where he earned his doctorate in sociology in 1958. He also studied at Oxford and the Catholic University of Angers, France. He served in the Navy during the Korean War.

He joined Columbia in 1996.

Mr. Tilly is survived by his former wife and sometime collaborator, Louise Audino, of Evanston, Ill.